| Monday, December 29, 2003 |
11:50 - I weep for the language
http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/005540.php
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So I'm glumly reading another of Tim Blair's sightings of some moronic journalist (yeah, yeah, redundancy alert) who thinks he's being righteously insightful by saying the following about Donald Rumsfeld's public statements:
I heard a speech by a man that made me realise that my quest to discover how humankind - being so unsuited to the rigours of this world - had managed to survive and prosper, was pointless and irrelevant. That man was US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and what he said was this, in relation to his country's failing search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we know we don't know. But, there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don't know we don't know."
When exposed to a mind like Mr Rumsfeld's the question of how we survived loses all import. In its stead looms the much more important and ultimately more troubling question of why.
Glumly, because as the first few commenters rightly point out, Rumsfeld's statement was perfectly astute and logical-- I only wish I were so clear in my thinking during verbal debate. So what is Mr. Weldon's problem with the statement? That it sort of sounds like a spoonerism? That it sounds like Rumsfeld is trying to obfuscate the facts? Is this the state of the art of the English language, when politicians in charge of war are the most adept wordsmiths of our age, and journalists are incapable even of comprehending a well-turned phrase without assuming it's fodder for one of those Foot-In-Mouth awards or public-goof One-A-Day calendars?
Weren't journalists supposed to be our last bastion of artful language composition? Weren't they supposed to be the ones who make English into a delicacy for the public to consume?
Maybe they are. Because after several quite well-thought-out comments following the post by Blair, comes this:
Fuck all your right wing nazi parroting. See youn assholes on the streets.
He even managed a three-syllable word. Boy's got a future in journalism.
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Brian Tiemann
